What's your strategy for landing a campsite in the Needles Campground at Canyonlands National Park?/Kurt Repanshek file
Being able to visit a website and reserve a campsite in the National Park System six months before your visit helps take the anxiety away of wondering where you'll stay. Unless you're thinking of camping in Canyonlands and Arches national parks in Utah, and no doubt some other units of the system.
The problem arises in campgrounds with a relatively small number of campsites. While the Watchman Campground at Zion National Park boasts 176 campsites, the Bridge Bay Campground in Yellowstone National Park lists 432 sites, and Tuolumne Meadows Campground in Yosemite National Park shows 304 sites, at Devils Garden Campground in Arches there are just 51, and at Needles Campground in Canyonlands there are just 26, of which only a dozen can be reserved, with the remainder first-come, first-served.
On recreation.gov you can reserve a campsite six months out from your travel...unless, of course, you plan to spend more than one night in that site. While individual campsites don't technically open for reservations until six months ahead of your desired date, if you claim a site six months out, you can extend your stay for a number of days. In the case of Needles Campground, you can book a seven-night stay, and that's where problems of securing a campsite intensify.
Recreation.gov releases sites for reservations at 10 a.m. Eastern, six months out. So if you live in the Pacific Time Zone and wanted to stay in Needles Campground on March 23, 2020, you needed to be ready to reserve your site at 7 a.m. on September 23, 2019. But your initiative wouldn't have been rewarded, unfortunately.
That's because at Needles you can relax in a campsite for seven consecutive days. And so folks who were able to latch onto a site on September 22, 2019, for March 22, 2020, arrival, could, in theory, reserve it through March 29, 2020. And so if you logged onto recreation.gov on September 23, as I did, you would have found each of the 12 sites booked through March 23, 2020, and some beyond that date. While there was one site available for March 24, you'd have to wait until September 24 to reserve that...if it was still available.
"If someone reserved for 3/22, they are allowed to book several days out," the chat room folks at recreation.gov told me when I mentioned all the sites had been reserved for March 23, 2020, before September 23, 2019. "The next available date is for site 27 and only for 03/24/2020. For 03/25/20, sites 18, 24, 25, 26, 27. I do apologize the sites were taken for today."
"But if you can't make a reservation until six months out," I replied, and someone reserves for a block of dates, how does one lock down a reservation?
"It is a relatively small camping area," came the reply. "I can only advice to check on the recreation.gov website to see which dates may come available 6 months out."
Now, there are those 14 first-come, first-served sites at Needles Campground, but the campground is a far drive for most folks, lying about 75 miles from Moab, Utah. From Salt Lake City, it's about a 5-6 hour drive.
Would you gamble on finding one of those 14 sites vacant after a long drive, knowing that if they were all filled you would 1) have to see if the private campground just outside the Needles District had space, 2) you had to drive 49 miles to Monticello, Utah, and hope there was a motel room available, or 3) drive all the way back to Moab with hopes of finding a vacancy?
What's the solution? Is there a solution? Do small national park campgrounds need to move to a lottery system? Do parks with just one small campground need to build more?
The answer, for now at least, concerning Needles Campground is to be flexible and broaden your search, Karen Garthwait at Canyonlands National Park told me. There currently are no discussions to enlarge the campground, she said.
"What I typically encourage people to do is plan ahead for something for their first night when in the area," she said. "Whether a private campground that you can book in advance, or a hotel room, or whatever people feel comfortable with as their lodging option. But having a reservation for that first night then lets you travel here with the security that you have a place to land, you can pop into whichever visitor center of whichever unit who are wanting to go to, find out the lay of the land, and then find out how early you need to be there the next day in order to get one of those first-come, first-served available sites."
Garthwait also noted that, in terms of Needles Campground, there are a number of campgrounds along Utah 211 just outside the Needles District that are managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, "(A)ll of which are first-come, first served, and they have been adding to them practically every other year the last couple of years."
Those BLM campgrounds are the Hamburger Rock Campground (10 sites), Creek Pasture Campground (32 sites), and Super Bowl Campground (37 sites). Those campgrounds are more rustic than the Needles Campground, with no running water and offering vault, not flush, toilets.
If your heart is set on Needles Campground and you are blocked from landing a site during the popular spring and fall seasons, there's always the brutally hot (100°+) days in the heart of summer or the cold (lows of 0°-20° Fahrenheit possible), short days of winter when all sites are first-come, first-served.
Comments
Typical Government scam. The workers get paid by the taxpayer. Yet the taxpayer never gets to use the system. There is no way at 7:00am all the sites are reserved.
recreation.gov is not your taxpayer funded worker... There is at least one NPS worker working for the private company recreation.gov but it makes no sense and seems quite illegal...
I reserved for April 12 of this year a night at Chaco Canyon (Gallo Campground). Only one night was available. The campground was all booked up.We got to Chaco on a cool day, with scattered snow showers. Campground sign said the campground was full. We secured our site for the night and settled in. The campground host came around and checked us in. We talked at some length about the reservation system. She was usually booked up but often had people come in late without reservations. If they came in late in the evening she would place them in a site where the reservation holder had not yet showed up but told them they would have to leave if they showed. This happened the night before we were there with a family of 5 in a van. Leaving Chaco for alternative camping means a return trip of 30 miles over the worst 12 mile washboard in the Park System.
I walked the 2 campground loops very early in the morning, before the park gates were open. The campground is about 35 sites and a number have been blocked off as "unsafe, due to possible rockfall". There were 14 parties camping. The rest of the reserved units sat empty.
As almost everyone else has said in this thread, Recreation.gov is awful. It's awful in every way. Making a reservation is awful. Utilization of the campgrounds is awful as many don't show up. While the campground is fully reserved, camping fees have been paid and the contractor secures their fee, many sites sit empty and unavailable. Surely there is a way to make unused sites available to others first come first served after a certain time of day...
Chaco Canyon is a wonderful place. Anyone with interest should visit. It can't be seen in a two hour whirlwind tour, especially after spending two hours driving in and another two driving out. Please, do something for unused but reserved sites to make them available.
By the way, the family of 5 spent the night sleeping in their van, without setting up anything for camping just in case they got the tap on the window telling them to leave. The tap never came...
Would like to know what you have found, we likewise have have felt there is something going on with insider's.?
Theres a $10 reservation fee + an $ 8 reservation fee for cancellation , that's $ 18. ! To Modify a reservation that costs $ 10. So this reservation system is making money and probably doesn't care . Expect a 25 minute wait on the phone for a Rec.gov rep to help you out-- and gawd, don't forget a question -- you'll be sorry you hung up . I found the site easy to book, understanding we don't always get what we want. But I'm really disappointed when I get there and it's nothing like the pictures, and the toilets and trash are full . Why did I pay for THIS disappment ?? The demands in ready-made campgrounds have been exceeded. Perhaps the breakdown is of our own making . Off season camping is just better.
They buy them as a group and resell them on fb
The Recreation.gov website has the same format for all the parks, but each park sets its own windows of availability and certain other things, and a staff person or dept at each park is responsible for setting up their booking system via Rec.gov. For example Pt Reyes National Seashore in CA now makes half their sites available 3 months prior and the other half available 2 weeks prior to accomodate early and late planners. I camp there a lot these days, and the Pt. Reyes staff person in charge of their camping system is really nice and will let you know the ins and outs of booking a reservation. Other parks must have such a person as well, if you call and ask maybe you can reach that person and let them know if you are having trouble reserving and they may help you like Pascal did for me at Pt. Reyes. My first time he actually reserved for me. I had wanted 4 consecutive nights (their upper limit) at 2 different backpack-in campgrounds and was having trouble getting them. After that and with his helpful emailed guidelines my learning curve improved and I was able to do it myself.
At Pt. Reyes' hike-in backpack sites most people only want one or two nights so the system is optimized for them and is harder for those who want the max - 4 nights. One of the several campgrounds is insanely popular. I never put all my four nights onto one reservation if I think I may try to change two of the nights to another site. If I want two nights at the popular campground I now first book my other two nights that I want at a less-popular campground (there are usually some sites available there anytime). No sites will show as AVAIL at the way-popular campground, though, all are either reserved or "not yet avail". So then I reserve those two nights at some other site that I would like as a fallback if I don't succeed in getting the popular one, but hoping that I might be able to change them to the popular campground at 7am when they become available 2 weeks prior.
I make 2 separate reservations because you can only change an entire reservation to another site - all the nights, not just one or two of them. I think that is built in to the Rec.gov site, not a park-specific rule, it's built in to the website. Then I get up early, and well BEFORE 7am I pull up my reservation itself that I want to change, click "change/alter" or whatever it is and then the campground list comes up with my reservation highlighted. Then BEFORE 7am I start changing my reservation. The website lets you enter the new campsite and go to the reservation page BEFORE the clock hits 7. I do it five or ten minutes before, I don't know exactly how early it lets you start - I don't think you can do it a half hour before. Before 7am the box for the 7am sites are clickable, you just can't finalize the reservation until 7am. I click all the way up to that point - filling in any camping etc info all the way through to just before the last submit button or whatever the last click is (and AFTER checking/clicking on that box under the "need to know" information - if you don't click that box you will be hung up at 7am and someone else will get the site!). Then I sit and count the seconds and punch the final 'submit' at the stroke of 7am. Has always worked so far.
For an insanely popular site, if you wait til 7am to start clicking and filling in all the info, someone else will get the site from under your nose - when you finally hit the last submit button it'll be several minutes past 7 and you'll get the popup: CAMPSITE NOT AVAILABLE. The website does NOT hold the site for you after you click on it for the period when you are filling in your reservation info! I learned this from experiencing it myself, the Pt Reyes camping desk person did not spell this out to me! I didn't have this problem at the other, less insanely popular Pt. Reyes campgrounds. Even though they are great campgrounds, too. I stay at them all but I know what I have to do if I want to get a spot at the popular one. (I'm pretty sure that after I change to another site, my first site then shows as "Available" for someone else to get, so it doesn't hurt anything, and if I don't succeed in getting the popular site, I'll still have that first one to fall back on.)
What did you find out when you called?